GameWorks FAQ: AMD, Nvidia, and game developers weigh in on the GameWorks controversy

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Last week, Forbes published an explosive story claiming that Nvidia had used GameWorks to cripple AMD’s performance in the new Ubisoft game Watch Dogs. This kicked off a series of events, including our own inability to duplicate similar results and a lengthy conversation with the senior vice president of Nvidia’s content and technology division, Tony Tamasi. Rather than rely solely on these conversations and perpetuate the he-said-she-said nature of the AMD-Nvidia discussion, we decided to take the questions AMD has raised about GameWorks and Nvidia’s counterpoints directly to developers themselves.

We sent out a number of requests for comment and insight to some of the most well-known project heads in the gaming business. Most respondents were only willing to speak off the record, but there were two exceptions: Tim Sweeney, the founder of Epic Games, and Richard Geldreich, a longtime OpenGL developer at Valve (semi-retired as of last week).

The GameWorks discussion has raised many questions about the nature of how game developers and IHV’s (Integrated Hardware Vendors, aka GPU manufacturers) collaborate, whether or not source code is important to that process, whether Mantle and GameWorks should be seen as equivalents, why Nvidia developed GameWorks, and whether GameWorks is a threat to AMD at all.

Because much of the debate over GameWorks is tied to the question of how games are optimized and what that process entails, we’ll start there.

Do AMD and Nvidia need access to developer source code?

AMD: Being able to see and share source code access is very important to our driver optimization process.

Nvidia: Having source code is useful, but it’s just one tool in our toolbox. There are many, many things we can do to improve performance without touching it.

Developers say: They’re both telling the truth.

The first thing to understand about IHV – developer relations is that the process of game optimization is nuanced and complex. The reason AMD and Nvidia are taking different positions on this topic isn’t because one of them is lying, it’s because AMD genuinely tends to focus more on helping developers optimize their own engines, while Nvidia puts more effort into performing tasks in-driver. This is a difference of degree — AMD absolutely can perform its own driver-side optimization and Nvidia’s Tony Tamasi acknowledged on the phone that there are some bugs that can only be fixed by looking at the source.

Both companies have their own development frontends and analysis tools. This is a shot from AMD’s GPUPerfStudio 2

This philosophical difference of approach makes sense given what we know of the two companies. Nvidia’s graphics business is much larger than AMD’s and the company has invested a great deal of money in creating 3D libraries, rendering engines, programming tools, and in some cases, specialized hardware blocks. AMD hasn’t tended to make as many of these kinds of investments; Mantle is the exception that proves the rule.

Some of this difference in approach is cultural but much of it is driven by necessity. In 2012 (the last year before AMD’s graphics revenue was rolled into the console business), AMD made about $1.4 billion off the Radeon division. For the same period, Nvidia made more than $4.2 billion. Some of that was Tegra-related and it’s a testament to AMD’s hardware engineering that it competes effectively with Nvidia with a much smaller revenue share, but it also means that Team Green has far more money to spend on optimizing every aspect of the driver stack.

Tagged In

Game Works and Mantle are not comparable. If AMD makes good of the promise to make Mantle open source and the transition to DX12 will be as postulated “LOW” effort the argument that AMD tries to segment the market evaporates and Mantle will have some future. For Game Works – I don’t know… PhysX comes to mind.

My concern with GW is that because developers are lazy/time pressured they will grab onto whatever money can buy and use it. Ubisoft is a good example of lazy&time pressured: Oh a library that makes x faster cool copy & paste… next…

Gameworks is fine and dandy but AMD should have access to those libraries so that they can optimize for them. Maybe these libraries can become sort of a standard. I say they are not opposable since gameworks is a library in the game engine/game while Mantle is an API much later in the pipeline.

If AMD, NVIDIA & Microsoft could just get along with this and come up with a DX12 that has the CPU overhead fixes that Mantle brings while offering optimized codepaths for Gameworks and make it so that at the end every game that uses GW pays royalties to NVIDIA (because it’s only fair – they did the work on that after all!) everybody will be happy. Since Microsoft gets the money from more windows sales and AMD gets the money for early access to DX12 features to optimize for their hardware: Who would win? US! Who would lose? Nobody!! Will it happen? Most probably not…

Also I would love for Mantle to be syntax identical to DX12 and be ported to Linux so we get much more linux games too, ports would happen faster and AMD could be the Linux hero with this and sell some additional hardware for that niche market that could soon turn into a tsunami if SteamOS lifts off. Standardization is the mother of replicability! And ports & graphics pipelines are in dire need of it so my message would be:
Microsoft, NVIDIA & AMD – Get the f* along and standardize this maybe get Valve involved too for SteamOS!

Stacey Bright

Apparently in business if you aren’t utterly decimating, humiliating, and bankrupting your competition, its a loss. Everyone wants their standard to be THE standard so they can dominate and profit. Not just some of the profit, or even most of the profit, all of the profit that stands to exist.

john

I sure hope it’s the old way of capitalism. While new ideas come about new avenues of revenue appear and ideas like crowd funding and shifting the focus from how can i force you to give me money ( technology lockins, trapped consumers, variety destruction etc) to what can i do for you so you want to pay me extra money for my services – may very well change the world. This is the new capitalism a true humane and modern capitalism that can grow unhindered and without “battles” or “wars”.

Because any type of client entrapment just states one thing about your products and business: it’s so bad you need tricks to stay afloat. Sad truth is most companies opperate this way becaise they don’t have a justified existance and the owners would do anything just to not let them fail… more of an ego battle if you ask me. Clients are not stupid and they are getting increasingly informed so selling bs might one day become obsolete so companies feeling the wind of change will thrive wile the dinosaurs that can’t addapt wull die out.

Trae Barlow

So, some developers might use use a proprietary / non open source API? Quick, call the President! Someone is not giving their trade secretes to the open source community!

john

That’s not the point, as you can see if you read my comment that I would like that the 3 companies collaborate and split the pie not behave like women on PMS and collaborate to bring greater value to us consumer while also making a sh*ton of money in the meantime. Shift the focus from being restrictive and forcing people to pay you to making people want to pay you or overpay you like apple usually does for instance.

Phobos

Poor AMD seems they always get bullied by NV or Intel one way or another.

Ronald

Too early to say game works is only on a few titles and those games are pieces of in optimze garbage.

Tegra is failure as Nvidias whole mobile division, also they lost out on consoles.

SKL_H

Yah shame wish they can keep up

massau

i guess Nvidia should create a gameworks consortium so amd and nvidia could disquis wich features are gooing to be implemented.

they both make there own code but the functions calls are exactly the same so the developers just use the right DLL. you get the dll with the drives you download. this also means that older games could also get faster or get better grapics later on when the dll gets upgraded.

vladx

Sorry, but from a business POV that doesn’t make any sense. Why should Nvidia make things easier for AMD free? Reasearch requires lots of money. As was pointed over and over again, if not having access to the source was such a big issues then AMD wouldn’t have been to release a driver with such significant improvements so quickly.

If AMD wanna win they better come with a better library and make developers forget about GW.

massau

i said thay both discuss the header files. which functions will be implemented they will both have a comment interface not a common implementation.
for c/c++ code they discuss the header files so but both make there own source files (c/cpp). it still is hard for amd because they have to implement all of these functions and they may or may not implement it as efficient as nvidia. but all 3 would enjoy a better environment and no one “looses”. (it would be a bit more like opengl or DX but high level)

vladx

That would still mean sharing results from research with AMD and those cost money.

massau

ok they would lose there edge but they would not leak any information to AMD. it would help the whole industry instead of giving them the key for unfair competition.

Trae Barlow

Forcing companies to GPL their technology would not “help the industry” any more than forcing you to open your front door to homeless strangers would “improve economic standards”.

Business law was developed for a higher purpose than getting a constant 60fps in video games.

massau

i did not mean GPL i just said they should discuss a commen interface. both implement it in there own way. than there can be no anti compedetive claims. so they can just build there own DLL file which are just drop in compadible.

GPL is just forcing anyone to become GPL that is not needed they don’t need to show the full source code just the interface.

Trae Barlow

So the govt should play favorites with AMD? How is that “fair” for other companies? AMD isn’t the only company in the world at a competitive disadvantage.

PS: I agree I would like to see something like that happen. But ultimately I don’t own majority stock in NVidia.

massau

did i say that the government should do that no i just said that a cooperative way of doing it would be a lot better than dooing it they way nvidia is doing it.

now this lib smells fishy but they could force 3th party libs out of the loop by making this a common lib and they would even make money by asking money for a premium version or just for licensing.

also who would use these libs if it works great on both platforms.

e92m3

What ‘research’?

There are plenty of alternative options for all the effects offered by gameworks, most of the alternatives are technically superior, too. They are for real developers, developers striving to make things you’ve never seen. GW is for mass production recycling.

The only ‘research’ would be akin to nvidia-specific driver optimization, which wouldn’t be relevant to AMD, nor would it be revealed by seeing the code behind the DLLs nvidia distributes…..GW just means nvidia has to do less work for titles that utilize it, since it’s already somewhat optimized in current drivers.

Really, there are no secrets or special offerings from GW, just what amounts to obfuscation due to lack of available source.

http://vgsage.com Azix

Exactly. People still think anyone really wants nvidias “research”. Most alternatives work better. All their tech does is act as an obstacle

Trae Barlow

1) You don’t need header files to look up an interface, you can just probe a DLL. Trivial task really, a college student can do it in 5 minutes with free tools from Apple, Microsoft or GNU.

2) The implementation is in hardware, that’s literally the entire point of GW.

vladx

AMD is just making a fuss because their own R&D is lacking compared to Nvidia’s. If they were sure they could beat Nvidia they would’ve simply come up with their own library that could compete with GameWorks. The finances don’t look too good on AMD’s side even with the profit they got from consoles.

actually there cards are on par and even better at compute than nvidia (except those titans market gimic). also nvidia pushed stacked memory for at least 1 year but almost no one seems to notice.

Azix

That is no solution that favors the consumer. Both companies putting out code that screws up the competition will just screw up the industry even more. AMD does offer tech but its not closed like nvidia

Bryan_S

Does no one remember TWIMTBP program?

Joel Hruska

I think everyone remembers TWITMTB. It’s still around.

http://www.video-game-chat.com/forum/ Video Game Chat

No idea what that is.

Joel Hruska

The Way It’s Meant To Be Played. NV’s historic marketing and optimization program. Goes back about a decade.

Bryan_S

Gameworks is the new face/extension of TWIMTBP which historically has been a lets make it run poorly on amd hardware program.

Mr. Maxwell

same thing as AMD’s gaming evolved program……

Azix

I doubt this. Gaming evolved program games seem to run well on nvidia because the focus is not proprietary crap but improving the actual game.

“it’s because AMD genuinely tends to focus more on helping developers optimize their own engines,”

nvidia is a meanie of a company.

32Devlin1

What are u 8 years old Meanies really, i do agree that AMD seems to try to be more open source then Nvidia and that Nvidia want money for everything they come up with instead of making it open source but its there company let them run it the way they want its the gamers that buy or dont buy that says if they are Meanies or not lol.

Trundle

Biased?

Ray C

I used to like AMD’s processor products, but since they merged with ATI, I really have’t sided with their products

That Catalyst software is some of the most abominable and insidious software this side of w8.

I’d never buy another ATI card.
And I dont see much point wasting time and money on AMD cpu’s either.

Spazturtle

So you wouldn’t mind it if NVIDIA put the price of their low end cards up to $1000 minimum and had no GPU cheaper then that?

e92m3

It’s always nice to hear the opinion of utter amateurs who couldn’t identify the actual source of a problem even if it stabbed them in the eye.

q n

AMD sucks. They cant beat NVIDIA at graphics and they cant beat Intel at processing. The only reason they should exist is to, at least for name sake, prevent a monopoly.

paratay

nVidia Gameworks is a complete and utter BS Marketing ploy. (GM VisualFX components are the relevant libraries which include GIworks, Waveworks,TXAA, Hairworks etc. PhysX is NOT part of the Gameworks library nvidia has been marketing)

People need to realize Gameworks is NOT available to any developer. It is only provided to large select few companies. So it is completely irrelevant for a majority of users. When you register with nVidia Developer network (You have to apply for GM access) you do NOT get access to anything in the GM library, only to the Turbulence example. For all others you have to contact nVidia for special licensing which is limited only to large companies. This very misleading and snake-oil type BS marketing hype.

Joel Hruska

According to Nvidia, in multiple phone conversations, PhysX absolutely is part of the GameWorks program.

paratay

‘According to Nvidia’ you are joking right? Ashton, am I being punked? I hope you get the gist… Gameworks is the term nvidia introduced lately, PhysX has a ‘very’ long histrory and nothing to do with ‘Gameworks’ , btw, you can download the entire PhysX SDK, right now instantly, just join nvidia BS. As you could for the last 7 years. Please send me the TXAA or GIworks sdk when you get it…

Whatever it used to be, or however the SDK was distributed, going forward, PhysX is rolled into GameWorks. That’s a fact.

Chris

As much as I dislike monopolies and large companies muscling smaller companies into extinction, I find it hard to sympathize with AMD twice.

This whole Gameworks saga is very similar to AMD’s quarrels with Intel in the past when most software were optimized with Intel compilers, thus running better with Intel processors. AMD continually kicked up a fuss but never invested in their own software tools to allow people to build better software for AMD processors. In fact, AMD even rested on their laurels and relied on the Intel compiler during the height of their Athlon glory days.

AMD not investing in software is a historical issue whether they are in good or bad times. I had immense sympathy for them in the past, but this is probably crying wolf twice for me now.

Neutrino .

If you are referring to the ‘cripple AMD’ Intel compiler scandal then I don’t think you know the whole story.

AMD licensed the use of certain x86 instruction extensions from Intel, they paid for the use of that IP, they were Intel’s customer. Intel then went out of their way to ensure that any compilers under their control explicitly crippled the use of those features that AMD had paid Intel for the use of.

it was nothing to do with AMD not being prepared to invest in their own software tools since they have no control over what tools developers use anyway.

It’s harder to imagine a more corrupt practice, and I guarantee that had it have been a non-US company that did that the US regulators would have fined them out of business.

Chris

I am aware of the GenuineIntel and GenuineAMD checks in the Intel compiler scandal.

The point is still this, why use Intel compilers? I agree that there is little control over the developer’s choice of compilers but the simple truth of the matter for us developers back then was this: Intel’s compiler and software tools were good. AMD’s were either non-existent or just plain bad if it existed.

It’s that problem of AMD not wanting to invest in its software that’s being played again today.

Joel Hruska

Intel got taken to court by the FCC and forced to modify its compilers not because they didn’t optimize for AMD, but because they aggressively marketed those compilers as the best products for the job in all situations, then surreptitiously broke compatibility for AMD.

What killed them was the false advertising, *not* the competitive situation.

Chris

Yes, I do appreciate that Intel got taken to court by the FCC and deservedly so. I don’t like monopolies who throw their weight around either.

The message I am trying very hard to get across is this.

If AMD invested in software, they will not be in this situation!

Twice in their history, their lack of software investment is biting back at them hard. Can we all as consumers agree on that and pressure AMD to realize this problem, so we get a healthy AMD that’s competitive? Right now, their hardware might be competitive but their software is crippling them.

Even if you look beyond the fact that Intel crippled AMD with their compiler and that if you hacked around the options, AMD ran faster on Intel’s compiler, you still are using Intel’s compiler back then. Nobody would use AMD’s compiler. Back then even, I won’t even know where to find an AMD compiler.

This is the point I’m trying very hard to make.
AMD, invest in software!

Joel Hruska

Chris,

Let me ask you something: If AMD invests in engineers who can help developers optimize their own engines, is it not investing in software? True, it has not created its own custom libraries, but it *is* investing in individuals whose job it is to help developers optimize their products.

I’m not saying you’re wrong. I just think the line is a little fuzzier than it used to be.

Chris

I’ll be honest and say I can’t answer this. I don’t know what level of support AMD now provides developers nor do I know how much support Nvidia gives developers.

I can only speak from experience when in the past, getting support from Intel is easy. Getting support from AMD was nigh impossible, despite the fact that I did work for a large company.

I am sure AMD invests in engineers who can help developers optimize engines. I think it was Tomb Raider which was one of the recent high profile games that had that support. Problem is we get one or two of these high profile games. And this isn’t investing in software. This is software support. There’s a difference between making software available that makes a developer’s job easier and support a developer to make their software run better on your hardware.

I’ll give you an example from my personal experience. When I was working for this company, we needed to calculate vectors quickly. Back then, we had 2 options, SSE or 3DNow!. Intel provided not only support, but tools and documentation to implement SSE. We never got off the ground with 3DNow!. We faced not just a lack of response from AMD, but we had no idea where to get any AMD tools to work with 3DNow!.

I could be naive, but I see Nvidia taking the initiative with building good devrel using such programmes to build closer developer ties, provide software support, tools and even development support. To the consumer, this has no bearing because all they want is the software in their hands. To the developers, it is a huge difference what the manufacturers provide. This support equates to many man-hours saved, be it from their developer support, or the tools easing developer’s work. Man-hours saved means money saved. These companies might argue no cash exchanged hands, but all of those saved hours by the developers all equate to cash saved. That’s the major difference.

I dearly wish for AMD to see this difference. If you ask me, Tomb Raider is a token effort. Only 1 developer benefitted. Until I see more games with Gaming Evolved or TressFx implemented, it remains as a token effort. I need AMD to understand that.

Contrast that with the huge number of games that used to be TWIMTBP as you mentioned in a post above.

Consumers dismiss this disparity. Developers don’t.

Joel Hruska

I think Mantle is an example of AMD committing more resources to software development and I can tell you that their driver responsiveness and speed of bug fixing has gotten better over the few years since Rory Read took over. They’re investing *more* on the software side, and that’s definitely good.

Now, obviously they aren’t in NV’s league on these issue, and I agree that historically, they took even less of an interest.

Chris

If there’s been improvement, maybe there’s hope. I can only take a wait and see approach.

This has been a good exchange and I thank you for it.

Trae Barlow

You think AMD goes and optimizes people’s game engines for free, you think they loose money on them? Those software engineers that go in and contribute code to companies who choose to hire them (or not to, AMD has no “rights” to game companies code like they clame) MAKE AMD MILLIONS.

LOL @ people thinking AMD is both a charity for AAA studios and/or an owner of the game engine code they are no longer allowed access to.

So game studios are chosing a new partner. Instead of contracting AMD they’re choosing NVidia, it just so happens NVidia has a pre-packaged name and marketing support for their “service” where AMD tried to keep it “hush hush”. Other than that, there is zero difference in the situation than the company being contracted for the job (NVidia instead of AMD).

You think that AMD doesn’t have pre-developed codebase, JUST like NVidia for all of the optimizations they do? Just because they don’t advertise it to the public? SMH.

e92m3

You seem to have a rudimentary (at best) understanding of what is being discussed.

‘ Those software engineers that go in and contribute code to companies who choose to hire them…..MAKE AMD MILLIONS’

False. In fact, AMD technically has taken a loss on a great many of their projects, mostly because they make most of their work open (eventually) and readily available to anyone that wants to use it. I guess you’ve never heard of a little thing called licensing fees, one of nvidia’s favorite games.

“(or not to, AMD has no “rights” to game companies code like they clame)”

False, no such *CLAIM* was made.

‘GW is the same product/service AMD has been delivering for years, companies are no longer choosing AMD and the first thing they do is rush to litigate instead of innovate.’

False, AMD’s form of optimization is entirely different than the DLLs nvidia provides to ubisoft and other copy-paste mass production studios. You would already know that if you actually read the article and had the ability to parse the information that has been presented.

Also, there has been no attempt at litigation…

Allow me to repeat: you clearly have little to no actual knowledge of what is being discussed.

Perhaps more “LOL”s and “SMH”s will make your next page of rambling nonsense more convincing. Or perhaps you’ll just be perceived as even more of a child…

Oh well, your decision.

Trae Barlow

There is quit ea bit more to a processor than “x86” or “x64”. If you think every x86 processor is the same, well, you probably also think a an i7 is a 4ghz, quad core 486.

Neutrino .

I don’t know where you got the idea from that I think every x86 processor is the same, and it doesn’t seem to have much to do with what’s being discussed here anyway.

Neutrino .

The notion that Gameworks will make life much harder for AMD and could therefore be seen as anti-competitive, but that wasn’t one of Nvidia’s considerations so that’s all right doesn’t wash with me for a second.

That said the question of exactly how shady Nvidia is being here is undeniably subjective.

Here’s something that I think is less subjective though. Nvidia is a hardware company, and customers buying their hardware is what should be what generates their profits. But charging customers (who play games on the hardware) for the hardware, and then charging customers (writing games that run on the hardware) again for the binary libraries that Nvidia themselves develop to facilitate building software that runs on that hardware, seems to me to be very much a case of charging twice for the same thing.

If you buy expensive hardware from a company you expect to get the SDK that facilitates use of that hardware as part of your investment. I don’t see what makes Nvidia think they are special in this regard, but if they are willing to behave like this now then it worries me how mercenary they might become if they succeed in marginalizing their only major competitor.

waltc3

I haven’t anything but AMD cpus since 1999 and AMD gpus (back when they were ATi) since the R300 way back in 2002. nVidia was horribly upset by how superior the R300 was to anything nVidia would be able to bring to market for a couple of *years*…;) nV pulled out all the stops and began cheating at benchmarks like 3dMK (no example of ATi “cheating” comes close to that one)–and publicly denying it until they couldn’t anymore–and had to finally admit it. Then there was a long period where nVidia blamed its FABs for its inability to compete with ATi (not true, either, as switching around with a game of “musical fabs” didn’t help them), and lastly nVidia blamed Microsoft publicly, “for the direction 3d is taking,” simply because R300 & descendants blew nV’s doors off consistently. nV also managed to lose the original xBox contract to ATi because it screwed Microsoft over in court, for one thing (in a well-publicized case, but also because like now, it had nothing competitive to offer to either Sony or Microsoft.)

I also stay away from nVidia products because they market to ten year olds; nV marketing is insulting to me, personally–oh, yea: almost forgot. My initial disdain for nVidia started with 3dfx’s introduction of FSAA into the 3d-gaming feature arena. It was a feature nVidia didn’t have because it was so busy copying 3dfx that it forgot how to innovate–nVidia officially trashed FSAA as a worthwhile feature simply because it needed a couple of years to implement the feature *after* 3dfx brought it to market in the V5 5.5k (great card in its day.) nVidia touted “24-bit 3d support” that ran at all of 3 fps in the original TNT–it was unsupported in 3d games and unplayable, but that didn’t stop nVidia playing it up otherwise; nVidia touted its use of “agp texturing” even when it was texturing from its 16MB local frame buffer just like 3dfx–who was honest about not using the agp bus for texturing because it was 20x slower than the local ram bus; and the list goes on and on.

How about the time nVidia sent some pre-release TNT2’s to Tom’s Hardware where the “good” Dr. Pabst-blue-ribbon cheerfully reviewed them (and compared them to stock-clocked 3dfx cards) running at 175Mhz…but when the TNT2 shipped six months later it shipped at 125Mhz. nVidia was *constantly* doing crap like that.

Pretty much, “green” is the color of road-kill for me these days…and I’ve seen nothing to change my mind about that in the last decade.

https://twitter.com/streaky81 Streaky

Most AMD GPU owners have simply declared Watch_Dogs broken and unfixable and got a refund from Valve. It doesn’t hurt AMD – it just destroys Ubisoft’s reputation that much more – game developers/publishers be warned.

Trae Barlow

It’s going to come down to which company offers developers better value. As an indy developer, I don’t anticipate AMD knocking on my door to volunteer and optimize my game code. I use middleware anyway, (UE4) and that middleware uses GameWorks.

At the end of the day AMD is trying to litigate instead of innovate. AMD isn’t a leader in anything at the moment, and the only way they can survive is to get the guberment to force their competetitors to give them money via their legal department.

The argument is, “Wahhh developers are using a software library that we don’t have rights too”. As if choosing a non open source/AMD technology is is some kind of unprecedented or illegal activity.

I don’t own a single piece of AMD hardware, they just don’t offer a competitive product at any single price-point. They need to QQ and develop some hardware/software worth using (their OpenCL SDK is good, for example) and maybe they wouldn’t be in this situation.

PS: From a business perspective, Mantle and Gameworks goals are the same thing (to gain marketshare for their developers), doesn’t matter what their technical goals are. Mantle sucks anyway. Developers have to learn this contorted and primitive API just to get the same performance NVidia delivers with DX11.

Joel Hruska

“At the end of the day AMD is trying to litigate instead of innovate.”

No litigation has been filed.

“I use middleware anyway, (UE4) and that middleware uses GameWorks.”

It’s optional, save for software CPU PhysX.

“AMD isn’t a leader in anything at the moment, and the only way they can survive is to get the guberment to force their competetitors to give them money via their legal department.”

First company to develop and deploy HSA — a technology that, while of minor usefulness at the moment, is widely believed to represent the future of computing (Intel and NV are both moving towards heterogenous computing models, as is ARM). First company to deploy a close to metal API — a move now copied by Microsoft and Apple. This isn’t innovation?

“From a development standpoint Mantle sucks anyway”

Not even Nvidia says this. Every developer I spoke to, including those not using Mantle, still thought Mantle was an innovative idea and a good project.

LtMatt

I love it when you get technical Joel. :P

Rossman Peter

The primary motivation behind GameWorks are the consoles. NVIDIA has the same libraries before they named it. OK the source code was public, but they actually did the same thing as they do now. The “developer” in the interview was right, NVIDIA don’t want to hurt anybody as a primary goal.

The GCN architecture has so many useful features. Even the Maxwell is a pre-gen class architecture compared to GCN. There will be a lots of next-gen effects on the consoles which are not possible on D3D11, or even D3D12. AMD can say: just port it Mantle, but what will NVIDIA say? Now this is the main problem. NVIDIA just want to create alternatives for those effects with different algorithms. They may not be so good, but they will run on todays hardwares. This is the primary motivation behind GameWorks.

Joel Hruska

Consoles don’t use Mantle.

LtMatt

I’d like to know if the new consoles could support freesync. If they’re GCN 1.1 (which i believe they are) then theoretically it might be possible.

Joel Hruska

Hrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrm.

They could, with an appropriate TV ASIC. But AMD might have removed that logic block from the controller it built for the two consoles. I don’t think we know.

Rossman Peter

They don’t need to use it. But for example PS4 libGNM is very close to
Mantle. There are several very interesting ideas in the industry which
is possible in libGNM, and possible in Mantle, but not in D3D11, or even
D3D12. Xbox One will also get D3D12 but with special extensions, and
some of those won’t available on PC.

I have learned some interesting stuff from the GCN docs. The architecture is more like a CPU than a GPU. One of my favourite feature is that the LDS will store the vertex data per rasterized triangle. The pixel shader can access the data, and it is super useful for high performance, high quality analytical antialiasing. But it can only work on GCN.
The second thing is Ballot, which is super important wavefront operation provides great flexibility for compute. With this, many new things will be possible, but in PC, Mantle is the only API that support it.
There will be many interesting GCN-only stuffs, which can be implemented on consoles, but on PC you need Mantle.

Joel Hruska

I don’t really expect to see many developers pushing the envelope on that front.

daryl305

in my opinion the real evil is gameworks, i can’t imagine how nvdia can have perf boost without jeopardizing perf on amd hardware
as for mantle
developers still has the option to optimize for directx, which has become the industry standard, A code written for mantle doesn’t affect the code for written for directx and will not affect performance on nvidia hardware.

Joel Hruska

Daryl305,

Alright. Whether or not the code in a GW library hampers AMD will depend on whether or not it’s deliberately designed to run poorly on AMD hardware. Let me give you two theoreticals:

1). There’s a code path for running on AMD hardware that’s acceptable, if not super-fast. Under this code path, GCN runs optimally, AMD runs “ok.” No, the code is not optimized for AMD, but it’s not crippled, either.

2). NV designs the library to run terribly on AMD hardware on purpose. AMD performance in a feature is 1/4 of NV performance in that feature.

#1 means NV has optimized its own library for its own card and left AMD performance alone. It doesn’t set out to cripple AMD, it doesn’t help AMD, it *doesn’t* design the library to sabotage AMD.

#2 would be a situation in which NV had crippled AMD.

So far, no game has shown strong evidence for #2. Even Arkham Origins, which blatantly favors NV, does NOT favor NV because of GameWorks libraries.

BDK

Please die in a fire nvidia. I’m sick of your propriety bullshit to be honest with you.

Guest

You forgot to update your article:

[Update: An Epic representative emailed me to clarify
that “NVIDIA GameWorks is not built into UE4. The engine ships with
PhysX.” This is curious because on Nvidia’s developer portal,
the company states that “we’ve incorporated support for NVIDIA
GameWorks directly into Unreal Engine 4 making it easier for UE4
licensees to take advantage of our technology.”Nvidia is choosing their
words carefully, but the intent seems to be touting the inclusion of the
GameWorks libraries (not just PhysX) directly into the Unreal Engine 4
core, and Epic has made it abundantly clear to me that that’s not the
case.]

However, the original article spawned a storm of nonsense from certain parties, so it’s good that you went back and confirmed what has already been said.

I would say the developer (and ‘developer’) responses to the mantle/GW comparison are the most enlightening….That one question is enough to expose the amateur developers looking for pre-made tools and pre-compiled binaries, heh.

xvl260

This is why I went with Nvidia this time, even if their gpu cost more. With most major title being Nvidia sponsored, they won’t run well on AMD hardware. Whether this is intentional or not is not important to the end user.

Kartina Wati

love to see how NV screw up their “tools”……until a little small tiny “tools” from a dev said “enough this BS, I want to break free with our engine despite all of Nv craps” yup, both modern consoles are AMD based…check the field again after Nathan Drake make his paths.

GANK-STER

Anyone who is saying “Nvidia isnt using GameWorks to stack the deck” against AMD/Ati needs to remember that TWICE Nvidia has been caught “stacking the deck” in shady as hell ways. This is one of the BIGGEST reasons I will NEVER purchase an Nvidia product. Both AMD and Ati have ALWAYS done business on the up and up and always at the benefit of consumers. Even IF Nvidia isnt using GameWorks purposfully to hinder AMD performance, it wouldnt surprise me in the LEAST that they consider it a damn good secondary benefit, otherwise why wouldnt they open the source code to AMD for free and/or get their input on it. It would be all too easy to just say, hey, we know your cards are having a little trouble with this so take a look at it and well see if we can do something about it. They wouldnt lose anything in licensing from game studios and they would even HELP sales for their product because the better those games run on AMD cards the more people who have those cards will be willing to buy them.

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